It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.

The chart really says it all. There are more than five times as many Internet users now as there were in 2000. And as has been noted elsewhere, the number of Internet users in the world is now close to passing two billion and may do so before the end of this year.

Back in 2000, Asia, North America and Europe were almost on an even footing in terms of Internet users. Now in 2010, the picture is a very different one. Asia has pulled away as the single largest region, followed by Europe, then by North America, and a significant distance exists between the three.

It’s also highly notable how the number of Internet users in Africa has increased. In 2000, the entire continent of Africa had just 4.5 million Internet users. In 2010 that has grown to more than 100 million.

Now compare it with the situation today (we included the position in 2000 within parenthesis):

以下は、現時点における比較である（カッコ内は10年前の順位）

Comparing the top 10 in 2010 with that of 2000, the countries have been shuffled around quite a lot, with China now firmly at the top.

2010年と 2000年でのトップ 10 の比較において、その順位には大きな変動があり、いまでは China がトップになっている。

New arrivals in the top 10 are India, Brazil, Russia and Nigeria. This of course means that some other countries have dropped out. South Korea is now at number 11, Italy at number 15, Canada at number 20, and Australia at number 27.

Top gainers (countries)

Since we’re looking at how things have changed between 2000 and 2010, we thought we’d include a section here showing which countries have grown the most on the Internet.

インターネット大国として、United States は China の後塵を拝配しているが、依然としてトップ 2 を保っている。

There’s another interesting segment, countries that have managed to grow their numbers with tens of thousands of percent. These are countries that had a very weak Internet presence ten years ago, but have now managed to gain much wider access to the Internet. One of these countries, Nigeria, has even grown to the extent that it’s now the 10th largest country on the Internet.

Although most of these countries are still relatively small on the Internet, you have to remember that some of them either don’t have huge populations, or are in less-than-ideal situations in terms of for example infrastructure. But there’s no doubt that developing countries are starting to catch up.

And you have to admit that it’s interesting looking back and realizing how relatively small the Internet was back in 2000. The 361 million Internet users from back then seem a tiny amount compared to today’s (almost) 2 billion.

According to the official announcement, Microsoft will provide technical guidance and assistance to startup Cloud.com to add Hyper-V support to its CloudStack offering. Once completed, Cloud.com will “develop the code to support OpenStack on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V” and add it to the OpenStack code repository.

Microsoft Hyper-V support is huge for both Cloud.com and OpenStack because Hyper-V adoption is rising fast. In the fourth quarter of 2009, for example, IDC estimated that Hyper-V licenses rose by 215 percent, compared with 19 percent for VMware ESX. Increasingly, it appears that cloud-computing software providers wanting to lure customers will need to support Hyper-V. Cloud.com is riding a momentum wave after its big private-cloud installation at Korean telco KT, and Hyper-V support will only help.

For OpenStack, Hyper-V support could make an even bigger impact. Web hosts and MSPs have been driving spending on cloud software as they seek to upgrade their offerings, and they’re starting to realize that their VMware-only hypervisor offerings won’t cut it for much longer. A free, open-source, MSP-proven platform that supports Hyper-V, as well as XenServer and KVM, should be appealing.

On a personal note, I wrote in July (subscription required) that OpenStack will face an uphill battle to gain real traction, and I stand by that proposition. If anything, the competition has gotten stronger since then, especially with the introductions of VMware vCloud Datacenter and vCenter Director. However, OpenStack has been evolving furiously, and it looks stronger with each iteration.